Saturday, November 23, 2024
7:40 a.m. Reading Oliver Sachs, The River of Consciousness, I had ideas for a blog entry, probably gone now, but let’s see. Jon Holt, you were a psychiatrist, you were an explorer like us, what say you? For that matter, are you in direct contact with Sachs?
I can be. As you should know, anybody can be, if they have the sympathetic resonance. Just because he and I are both dead, so-called, doesn’t mean we are any closer or farther away than when we were in the body. The difference is in the distractions life throws up in the 3D world of separation.
Our language tempts us to think that once outside the body, our minds are less focused, less conscious, than they were.
Yes and no.
Heard that before!
Well, most things are a matter of how you look at them. In the 3D, you tend to get seduced by one way of seeing things, just as Sachs says in what you just read. Confirming evidence piles up; contradictory evidence tends to be forgotten or repressed. It requires a certain amount of awareness and determination to remember that one way of seeing things can never be the whole story. Nor two, for that matter. The closer you look, the more nuances you see, and so the more exceptions you find to your generalizations, until you have Swiss cheese and then maybe only crumbs without much connection.
So yes, the non-3D mind is less focused – until it is. And no; the non-3D mind is also less distracted once it is focused. both halves true, neither half the whole story.
So Oliver Sachs and I may coexist without consciously communicating in any way I could describe, and yet we wouldn’t be separated, we’d just be – well, coexisting. But then a friend contacts us and holds us in mind at the same time, and there is a connection. Did anything change? Well, yes and no. We are still what we were; our “vibes” aren’t any different, we haven’t been changed. But we have been brought to each other’s mind, you could say, and so although we aren’t changed, our shared awareness is a change. So, yes but no.
And I get that one of the functions of the 3D is to facilitate just that kind of non-3D to non-3D interactions. Hadn’t thought of that before.
You contact Lincoln and the mind you call Smallwood, and Carl Jung and Lincoln Steffens and Hemingway and various people you knew in the body. These are all the equivalent of neural pathways you have facilitated. Perhaps Lincoln and Jung and Hemingway would never have had any reason to work together, or (more likely, in fact) two or more of them would have “come together” from someone else’s 3D associations. It is a real construction of a non-3D link.
Probably for purposes we can’t grasp.
Purpose that isn’t any of your business, maybe. You do what you do for your own purposes, and yet everything you do has other effects, most of them unsuspected by you if only because of geographical or temporal distance. Everything ripples, and nobody knows all the patterns, nor needs to.
So let’s talk about my half-forgotten theme that came to me, reading Sachs.
You sure you want this in the open, on the record?
I wasn’t thinking it would be anything particularly sensitive.
It is all about what you see yourself doing.
Ah, I get it. Delusions of grandeur.
Accusations of delusions of grandeur. Within proper limits, what you have in mind is perfectly appropriate. And, you do keep it within limits. You are not deluded into thinking you are more important than you are. If anything, you are in the direction of the fallacy of insignificance.
In any case, I see the need.
Sachs was describing why certain ideas may come to nothing, or may come to nothing for 50 years or more, and he was showing how the scientific mind no less than the artistic mind is vulnerable to error for various reasons, not all conscious ones.
And I have been saying that our next civilization will be based on many things, some of which we have discarded as superstition.
[And I remember, typing this, that actually this was originally something we got from the guys. I have believed it long enough now that I am regarding it as my own idea, not that there is ownership of ideas.]
His point is that there are reasons why the truth in some things cannot be seen at a certain time or from certain intellectual standing points.
But the thinkers don’t usually recognize their own blind spots.
Considering the amount of psychic energy that goes into creating and maintaining those blind spots, that’s hardly surprising!
But I don’t have the background or the training or the time or the energy to do the shuffling though all the data that must be out there. No one does.
No, no one does, but civilizations aren’t built by any one person. Even an Einstein, a Newton, an Emerson, a Yeats, can make only a tiny contribution to changing how people see things – but nothing wrong with that, as your guys always say. A tiny bit of work carefully done, leads to future possibilities.
One thing there I see I would have disagreed with Sachs, he seems to have believed in luck, in chance.
That is one way to see things. It is only wrong if taken to be an absolute. Similarly, your way of seeing things is only wrong if taken as an absolute. By now you should know, nothing can be said that cannot be contradicted truly. Life contains all contradictions.
And does not contradict itself, I know. Sort of hard to see how a thing can be true and not true.
Instead of saying “be,” try saying “seem.”
Aha!
Yes. Most of what people know is actually how something seems from a point of view, not how it is absolutely, world without end amen.
And that’s why we need to be re-examining what we think we know.
If people could get into the habit of thinking, not, “This is how things are,” but “This is how things seem,” they’d find it less disruptive when they were forced to go with the flow. And your times – that were my times too, obviously – are plenty strong on flow.
Any concluding words? This doesn’t feel complete but I don’t know what if anything it is missing.
The reason you have been led toward uncovering your unconscious impulses, your habits and screens and scripts and all the unconscious filters that separate you from the here-and-now is so that you could be able to do just what we’re talking about: to reexamine your mental and spiritual world in light of a wider, freer consciousness. Living in a freer spot amounts to living life more abundantly – and that more abundant life enables you to ask better questions, experience deeper meanings.
Clear, as soon as you say it. Okay, Jon, thanks. I trust that you will contact us if we can somehow help you, and in return we’ll keep an ear to hear you if you come prompting.